President James Monroe, running unopposed for a second term, fell just one vote short of a unanimous election—an accomplishment that, had it been achieved, would have placed him in the company of George Washington as one of two presidents elected without explicit opposition. By 1820, a pervasive attitude of general political consensus had settled in throughout the nation, and it appeared for a time that the young republic was in the midst of stability and a sense of like-mindedness that would endure for some time. The Columbian Sentinel, a Massachusetts newspaper long known for its uncompromising loyalty to the Federalists, is credited with first identifying Monroe’s administration as the Era of Good Feelings. More skeptically, Roanoke’s John Randolph described Monroe’s acclamation in 1820 as the “unanimity of indifference, and not of approbation.” Monroe governed in a time when significant party opposition appeared to have disappeared from the political sphere, a remarkable and welcome situation after two decades of heated interparty animosity (checkered by occasional intraparty rivalry). A one-party system appeared to have fallen into place.
In spite of these appearances, however, the Era of Good Feelings was not without problems. In 1819, the country faced its first major economic crisis, increased conflict with Native American tribes accompanied by rising international tension, and more visible evidence of potentially volatile antipathies over the issue of slavery. In 1819, the country faced a serious economic depression—what would become known as the Panic of 1819, and what would linger for nearly three years (lasting well into Monroe’s second term) before it was all over. Numerous banks failed, due largely to the fact that they had indiscriminately made loans to land speculators who had predicted that land prices would continue to escalate and, as a result, were purchasing still more land in the blithe expectation of the continued trend toward rising land value. Simultaneously, high prices for farm goods led farmers to borrow more money so that they could deepen their investments in their own farms. But borrowers suddenly found themselves in too deep, and a large number of loans went into default, sending the national economy into a precipitous downturn. When the speculation bubble burst, a high number of banks closed, and subsequently the production of manufactured goods sharply dropped. Trade abroad, which had been steadily growing since the end of the War of 1812, suddenly froze. Unemployment in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore reached unprecedented levels. Factories closed throughout the country, and the price of crops such as cotton plummeted. Meanwhile, the government found itself slipping further into debt, thereby fueling the general sense of disquiet regarding the economic health of the country. Had there been an organized opposition to the Republicans, Monroe’s reelection would have needed to surmount a serious challenge, requiring a second term to have been won against contenders rather than, as it was, merely assumed.
Regarding foreign policy, while trouble with Great Britain had subsided since the 1814 Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812 six years earlier, a dispute with Spain over stalled negotiations in the matter of Florida, at that time still under Spanish sovereignty, threatened to pull the United States into yet another conflict with a European power. At the behest of President Monroe but without congressional permission, General Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, audaciously led an occupation force into Spanish Florida in pursuit of a contingent of Seminole Indians who had conducted raids across the Georgia-Florida border after refusing to recognize federal claims to Indian lands that had, at least from the perspective of the U.S. government, been previously settled by the outcome of the Creek War (or Red Stick War, in which General Jackson had also played a decisive role). While leading the military campaign in Florida, Gen. Jackson precipitated an international incident when he rashly ordered the unlawful execution of two British subjects on the charge that they were providing weapons to the Seminoles. Jackson’s moves in Florida, which were more or less conducted under his own judgment, were at best only vaguely supported by the president, and certainly actions such as the summary execution of two foreigners was not within Monroe’s design. The president’s cabinet sternly criticized the general’s actions, with the significant exception of Monroe’s secretary of state (and former ambassador to Great Britain), John Quincy Adams, son of former president John Adams, who rebutted criticism of Jackson from both John C. Calhoun, Monroe’s secretary of war, and Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House, and further argued that American intervention in Spain was legitimate given the inability of the Spanish governors to ensure peace in the Florida territory. A capable negotiator, Adams eventually persuaded Spain to sell outright the troublesome peninsula to the United States. Hence, what began as a potentially deadly crisis with yet another European Great Power ended in the first addition of land to the new country since Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, a feather in the cap of the Monroe administration. Additionally, it was Adams who was the chief author of what would come to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, asserted in Monroe’s 1823 annual message to Congress, and issuing a warning against European ambitions, particularly aimed at France and Spain in the Western Hemisphere. Well received by the general public, the Monroe Doctrine carried further weight owing to the tacit support of Great Britain, America’s former enemy, now more than willing to cooperate with the young republic as a bulwark against Spanish and French ambitions in Latin America. Indeed, the force of the Monroe Doctrine, at least initially and thereafter through much of the nineteenth century, relied upon the quiet endorsement and steady forbearance of the British government.
In the West, the proposed admission of Missouri as the Union’s newest state raised again the ugly issue of slavery, the immediate question being whether Missouri would be admitted as a slave or free state, with larger issues ominously brewing behind this question. In 1818 an amendment that had been attached to the Missouri statehouse admission bill prohibiting the future importation of slaves into the Missouri Territory had passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. The action ignited a firestorm of debate between slavery’s supporters and opponents. Abolition sentiments, which had been simmering for decades, rapidly intensified, thereby alarming Southern supporters of the Peculiar Institution. Early in 1820, New York senator Rufus King, who had long opposed slavery (and who had also been the Federalist candidate for president in 1816), delivered a speech forthrightly calling for the exclusion of slavery as a condition for the admission of the new state of Missouri. King’s speech helped fuel rumors of a possible new abolitionist party and further provoked slaveholding interests. In the months that followed, few could remain unaware that the struggle over the admission of Missouri, and the renewed debate over slavery that it had reignited, foreboded severe sectional antagonisms that would, among other things, reshape the landscape of presidential campaigns politics.
The Missouri Compromise was eventually settled in a manner that did not touch the political fortunes of President Monroe, but now that the issue of slavery was more visible to the public at large, it was becoming desperately clearer as to how the problem of slavery would stir future crises, and likely sooner rather than later. Famously, former president and revered elder statesman Thomas Jefferson, in retirement at Monticello, could hear in the Missouri Compromise what he likened to a “fire bell in the night,” which had “awakened and filled” him with a palpable sense of “terror,” and which had sounded what he feared would prove to be the “death knell of the Union.” Jefferson’s sense of doom notwithstanding, for the time being, President Monroe was not hampered by the pall of slavery, and he needed only to extinguish a few small and easily managed political fires to secure reelection. In Pennsylvania, for example, the influential and provocative Republican publisher William Duane, denouncing Monroe’s administration as pro-slavery, sponsored a movement to draft New York’s DeWitt Clinton for the upcoming presidential election and persuaded one-third of Pennsylvania’s voters to choose electors pledged against Monroe. Despite this minor revolt, Monroe still controlled two-thirds of Pennsylvania’s electors and subsequently received Pennsylvania’s twenty-five electoral votes.
Monroe, in spite of significant crises foreign and domestic, economic, political, and moral, remained essentially unchallenged. In the end, Monroe carried every state (24 at the time) and received 231 out of 232 electoral votes cast—three electors having died before they could cast their ballot—which, excluding President Washington’s two unanimous and atypical elections, remains down to this day the biggest Electoral College landslide in the history of American presidential elections, and one not likely to be matched. Unanimity was blocked by one lone elector, Republican (and former Essex Junto Federalist) William Plumer of New Hampshire, who voted for John Quincy Adams, Monroe’s able secretary of state, and thereby prevented Monroe from duplicating Washington’s still-unparalleled achievement. Folklore holds that Plumer voted against Monroe for no other reason than his belief that no comparison should be made between Monroe, or anyone for that matter, and the august Washington. However, historians have noted that there was no way Plumer could actually have known the exact final tally at the time he voted, and thus he would not have been aware that Monroe was in a position to receive a unanimous vote, although it is possible that he could have, through reasoned conjecture, anticipated Monroe’s clean sweep. Some have claimed that Plumer’s vote in reality may simply have been intended to draw attention to the younger Adams as a potential future candidate, or perhaps as the sole voice of opposition to the established policies of Monroe’s administration. That aside, the actual reason behind Plumer’s vote remains unknown. Incidentally, all nominal Federalists—there were thirteen in the Electoral College—voted for Monroe. Vice President Tompkins was also reelected, receiving 218 electoral votes; the remaining 14 votes were divided among four alternatives, none a serious challenge. New England electors had approached Adams, offering to support him to replace Tompkins as vice president, but Adams was not interested. Owing to his reelection as Monroe’s vice president, Tompkins would come to be known as the last vice president to serve two consecutive terms under the same president until the early twentieth century. (Almost a century hence, Thomas R. Marshall, who would be elected as vice president along with President Woodrow Wilson and serve from 1913 to 1921, would become the first since Tompkins to serve two full terms under the same chief executive.)
While the Monroe administration was undeniably popular, and the president a capable leader and rightly esteemed public servant, it is to be remembered that an important reason behind this nearly unanimous landslide was the simple absence of any alternative. We do not know how Monroe would have fared against a credible challenger, and it is also to be remembered that Monroe’s outstanding conduct in office was surely a factor in there being none. We do know one thing—the political consensus that made this landslide possible was soon to come to a swift and unseemly end.
Boller, Paul F., Jr. Presidential Campaigns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Cmiel, Kenneth. “1820.” In Arthur M. Schlesinger, Fred L. Israel, and David J. Frent, eds. Running for President: The Candidates and Their Images. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Cunningham, Noble. The Presidency of James Monroe. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996.
Turner, Lynn W. “Election of 1820.” In Arthur M. Schlesinger, Fred Israel, and William P. Hansen, eds. History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968. Vol. 1. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.